I am not by any measure old unless you ask my nieces, but I remember when we had no internet and my niece's minds boggle at that, they think I must be ancient. How could you survive without the internet they asked me, in their minds the concept of no internet is pretty much science fiction and the thought of not having internet access scares them.
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.
When the Internet Was a Place - Front Porch Republic
Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers blinking in tandem, waiting for your class to arrive and hop online. You had to purposefully arrive at the internet, and when done, you left […]
Historical pragmatism and the internet
This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.
we were online
Turn the internet into a living, shared space with real-time traces of people browsing.
The Internet Will Be More Dead Than Alive Within 3 Years, Trend Shows
All signs point to a future internet where bot-driven interactions far outnumber human ones.
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet
A book about how to survive on the internet. It’s about the cozy web, the dark web, the dark forest, the clear net, the dark net, and a new social world emerging around us. This is the Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.
The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
Kill The Internet IRL in Austin TX
A night of philosophizing in the digital age of chaos and decay. Discussions with three online public philosophers on technology, privacy, and the state of our internet enmeshed civilization.The D...
Was their any substantial backlash to the internet when it first started becoming popular? I can imagine that going from a comparatively disconnected world to one where instantaneous global connection 24/7 were commonplace was a rather massive (and not always positive) shift in many ways.
2.7M subscribers in the AskHistorians community. The Portal for Public History. Please read the rules before participating, as we remove all comments…
The Sites We Lost
A memorial to the weird little corners of the internet that lived on The Useless Web.
Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.
We’re never going back to the human internet we had. But we can hope for a better internet than the AI-dominated one that is emerging, writes Sarah Gilbert.
The Extended Internet Universe
The Internet is now a very complicated place
“The internet represents a closing of the parenthesis and a return to older models of understanding. Human consciousness in the digital age, which de-emphasizes the categorization that marked the age of print, makes us think in a way that is reminiscent of a medieval peasant.”
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
web.mit.eduThe Internet, and how we've developed with it
Not "doomscrolling has killed our lives". But how, looking back, our enjoyment of the internet has shaped our experience of life.
We can have a different web
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
VC&G | » My memories of what life was like before the Internet
Habbo Hotel Memories - Sneer Campaign
blogs.loc.gov
My old SoundCloud page is a time capsule
